Portfolio Update: December 2018

We’ve reached January 2019. Happy New Year to you all! Most people look ahead and make New Year resolutions. You know, quit smoking, quit drinking whiskey when you are alone and depressed (never!). For me however it’s time to look back again and assess the previous month for yet another portfolio update.

December was chaotic. Record stock market plunges were followed by record gains. Only to be followed by large drops once again. See-sawing, that’s the word. And at times my mood was moving in the same pattern.

Investors around the globe are getting increasingly nervous. There are just too many negative signals. The economic slowdown, an erratic guy in the white house, Brexit, trade wars, interest rates, it’s just too much to handle.

But to be honest, I never really worried that much. The main reasons for this are:

The YTD return for my company’s stock is still a rather massive 25%. That’s amazing considering the significant drops in recent months.

The YTD return based on the discounted price (for which I purchased company stock this year) is 47%. Yes, you read correctly. Even after the drops in the last couple of months, the return on my 2018 company stock investment stands at 47%. To give an idea what this meant, in December the next purchase of company stock was due. An investment close to $10K. At a discounted price, which meant an instant capital gain of $4.7K (47%)!

Glenfiddich 15 Year Solera, a beautiful whiskey.

It doesn’t mean I wasn’t affected. Last month my company stock took another ~10% hit. But my point is that the ESPP program – allowing me to obtain stocks for a discounted price – is the perfect cushion. Its positive effects balanced out the negative effects of the recent market turmoil.

But let’s have a look at the numbers.

December 2018

Income

The income/gain looks like this:

Company shares

As you can see, the loss (company shares) is small (lower than 1%). Considering the massive declines in the markets that’s actually great news. Again, this is because I ‘earned’ quite a bit of money with the discounted company shares.

Below is a chart with the month on month income. Overall it is looking good. I’ve been hit by the turmoil in the markets (especially in October), but the overall decline in capital gain is limited.

Note: The chart deviates from the one I showed in previous months, because I decided to reflect the selling of 75 shares by also lowering my investment amount. I hadn’t done that before, which painted too negative a picture. Contrary to what I stated before, I already sold these shares back in 2016/2017. I have moved this event to where it belongs and adjusted all the relevant numbers. The chart is much cleaner now and reflects the true capital gain.

I ended the year with a capital gain of 62% of my total investment in company shares (total capital gain / total investment). See below chart.

So despite the turmoil in the markets, my company stock asset continues to be very profitable!

Crowdlending

I didn’t increase my investments in loans on Mintos (crowdlending platform) but the return is accumulating (and automatically re-invested using Mintos’ auto-invest feature, so I just sit back and relax and watch my money work for me.

Portfolio

I decided to include the equity I hold in my mortgage-free home in the charts (because I see this as part of my investment portfolio).

If we forget about my home (second pie-chart), then I have 3% invested in non-correlated (alternative) assets (Mintos). This is too little and down from 3.4% last month. The reason is that I didn’t invest more funds in Mintos in December, but did increase my position of company stock.

Net worth

In terms of net worth, 2018 saw an increase of around $25K, amounting to around 8%.

Mortgage-free home

$300K

Company shares

$66,967.04

Crowdlending

$2,072.96

Liabilities

$30K

Net worth

$339,040.00

That’s an increase of $10,288.71 (3.1%) compared to November 2018. Yay!

Thanks SavingNinja! The graphs in this post are created in Google Sheets. Here they’re just screenshots, but on my portfolio, investment and income pages I embed them (using an iframe…well the WordPress equivalent) so they’re interactive 🙂
I also use plain old Excel for charts by the way.
Glad to hear a new Thought Experiment is coming up in February! 🙂 I really enjoy this series. It is original, thought provoking and simply great fun! If you lack topics, you can always ask on Twitter for ideas I guess. Or it could take a tour and be hosted by other blogs (with all the links to you – the creator – intact of course). 🙂